Activities to personalize topics, language, communication skills and business skills
The IATEFL BESIG Summer Symposium was a wonderfully intimate event with a wide range of excellent presentations. On Friday, Evan Frendo provided the excellent keynote, Exploring business English. He’s got a clear vision that is enormously helpful to anyone working in the field. Then I went to Simona Petrescu’s presentation on how to create a […]
David Heathfield’s workshop on storytelling and mental imagery
I couldn’t make IATEFL, so it’s really great that some of the sessions are recorded and uploaded. I particularly enjoyed David Heathfield’s workshop “Storytelling and Mental Imagery”. The flow of the lesson he proposes is great. He has learners listening to the teacher tell the story visualizing the highpoint of the story with a partner+ […]
Pete Seger: Turn Turn Turn
RIP Pete Seeger (3 May 1919 – 27 Jan 2014). He turned Ecclesiastes 3 into Turn Turn Turn. At this concert when he was 93, he said his wife Toshi had made up a few extra verses for their children. Like the rest of the song, they contain matching and contrasting words: work – play […]
How to die a social media death
Countless media bloopers, some with repercussions, have caused me to die little social media deaths. By “social media death” I mean that sinking sensation that I’ve done something that will turn my social networks against me. When Twitter was still young, I would lie in bed at night thinking “Have I thanked XYZ for their […]
Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter
After a year off social media, I’ve rejoined Facebook because so many of my peers are networking there, and I really felt I was missing out. Things like organizing meetups are happening there, or news on who is going to which conference, but also people having children and getting married, and career changing events like […]
Business correspondence
A short phrasebook for secretarial business correspondence has been published in my name. I was somewhat surprised when it was brought to my attention. I’m pretty sure it extracts the key phrases from a large collection of letters I wrote about 12 years ago, edited down by the publisher a few years back to bring […]
Cornelsen Basis for Business C1
How exciting – the book I worked on for a year, with Carole Eilertson writing the practice sections, has just been published. I’ve been lucky to work with inspiring people and a great team, with Janan Barksdale editing, and now the book is public. There will be a teaching guide by Andreas Grundtvig and a […]
